Boyd: "the celebrated film Brononosets
Potyomkin (The Battleship Potyomkin or Potemkin, 1925)"
The correct spelling is
bronenosets (which means "battleship" and "armadillo").
Even if VN disliked the movie, he would not have misspelled its
title.
P. O. Tyomkin is mentioned in Russian
Lolita (2.23): едва ли следовало быть знатоком
кинематографа, чтобы раскусить пошлую подковырку в адресе: "П. О. Тёмкин,
Одесса, Техас". If I were annotating Ada, I
would have mentioned the thirty sons of Lieutenant
Schmidt, innumerable grandchildren of Karl Marx (known on
Antiterra as Marx pere) and Chernomorsk in Ilf & Petrov's "The
Golden Calf," Chernomor and thirty three knights (all of whom live in the
sea) in Pushkin's "Fairy Tale about Czar Saltan."
Boyd: "The first line Van cites echoes the
alternative Russian title of the tango, but the second line is Nabokov’s
invention."
Not quite so. Pod znoynym nebom
Argentiny is the tango Ostap Bender dances solo in Ilf &
Petrov's "The Golden Calf." In the same novel, pod sladkiy lepet mandoliny ("to the
sweet murmer of mandolina") the Roman Catholic priests Moroshek and Kushakovski
охмуряют (try to seduce) their compatriot Adam Kozlevich, the driver of the
Antelope Gnu car. The line was invented by Ilf & Petrov and slightly changed
by Nabokov (who kept the rhyme).
a green world rotating in space and
spiraling in time
Earth's twin planet reached by the hero of Dostoevsky's story
"Сон смешного человека" ("The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," 1877) after he had
committed suicide in his dream is also green. In my "Ada as a Triple
Dream" I suggest that Antiterra (aka Demonia) is this green planet
(the history of its inhabitants lags behind but, after the ridiculous man's
arrival, accelerates and almost catches up with the history of our world). In
another article I argue that Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu
of the 19th century corresponds to the mock execution of Dostoevsky on
January 3, 1850 (NS). January 3 is Lucette's birthday.
Brian Boyd (I hope he will pardon me saying this) is a
brilliant biographer and good commentator, but he failed to notice the three
main things about Ada:
that it is a dream;
that it is a fairy tale;
that it is a charade-like puzzle
(шарадовидная загадка).
Alexey Sklyarenko